"9. Anyone who slags Pierce Brosnan's vocal stylings in this picture clearly has not experienced the majesty of Oliver Reed in `Tommy.'"

That's a line from Glenn Kenny's scream-of-consciousness review of "Mamma Mia," featured over at his blog Some Came Running. (Which, I hope, is what readers did, when they found Kenny had been laid off from the increasingly irrelevant Premiere.com a while ago, and started his own site.)

I thought it was all pretty funny, and even if I don't share his guilty attraction to Christine Baranski, I didn't mind adding to his list myself (my own, equally appalled review runs later this week).

Still, it got me thinking about larger subjects. Like, what the heck is wrong with musicals these days?

Lane, Thurman, Broderick: Flopping in "The Producers"

Before the "You-just-don't-get-it" chorus starts, let me say I like musicals. Last year "Sweeney Todd" made my Top Ten List; the year before, so did "Dreamgirls." In fact, I love a good movie musical.

Operative word, "Good."

But with "Mamma Mia," Hollywood made the exact mistake they did with "The Producers" - hiring the director who turned the show into a big hit on Broadway to do the same thing on the screen.

Doesn't work that easily.

Everything in "The Producers" was way, way over-the-top - as if Nathan Lane (never a shrinking violet to begin with) wasn't on a soundstage in front of a big fat closeup lens, but in a theater where he had to scream and mug so the tourist in the cheapest seat wouldn't miss a thing.

And nothing in "Mamma Mia" has been done with an eye towards the big screen it has to fill. Major numbers are reduced to troops of villagers dully marching up and down the street. Star Meryl Streep's big song consists of her standing on a cliff, waving her arms, while Pierce Brosnan stares at her.

This isn't moviemaking.

(UNIVERSAL)Oh, "Mamma": Streep in flight

It's true that directing for the stage and directing for the screen are different talents, and not every artist has both. Sam Mendes ("American Beauty," "Road to Perdition") moved smoothly to the movies; Julie Taymor ("Frieda," "Across the Universe") a little more bumpily.

Both, though, continued their signature strong work with actors - and found ways to translate their singular visual sense from live theater to filmed entertainment.

It's not easy.

In fact, it's almost like learning another language. The performances that may be just right for the Lyceum look like silent-moving hamming at the Ziegfield. And what lighting and staging subtly accomplish in a play - alerting the audience to pay attention to a specific detail - is done in a movie with a closeup or a camera movement.

But talented as they were as stage directors, Susan Stroman made her big-screen debut with "The Producers;" Phyllida Lloyd made hers with "Mamma Mia!" And we pay for their on-the-job training with every ticket.

It's peculiar, because Hollywood has always - sometimes infuriatingly - insisted on buying Broadway properties and then stocking them with movie actors. So it was Rosalind Russell, not Ethel Merman, who got to do "Gypsy" Lucille Ball, not Angela Lansbury, who went into "Mame."

That tradition continues. Although Lane and Matthew Broderick were allowed to do "The Producers," the real producers shoved inappropriate stars - Will Ferrell, Uma Thurman - into every other part. "Mamma Mia!" cast a too-old Meryl Streep, and then shanghaied both James Bond and Mr. Darcy. And none of these results were particularly felicitous.

It's Hollywood, really, that "doesn't get it," as it keeps buying musicals and then making the wrong personnel changes. Because movie musicals do not, necessarily, need movie stars. But they do, very often, need movie directors.